There are several makers of Linux laptops, at this point: I've had great experiences buying from ZaReason, I know people who have had great experiences buying from System76, and ThinkPenguin is another option.
My wife has a ZaReason Alto 4330 that she loves even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.
For work, I've had several ZaReason machines--including some Alto 3880 laptops (the previous generation of what my wife now has). We got the Altos with 8-way multiprocessing (4-core + hyperthreading) and gobs of RAM, with run-times of 3-4 hours on a single charge and weight just over 4 lbs; they've made fantastic developers' laptops for us.
And, for what you get, the ZaReason machines aren't even that expensive (seriously--a monster-power Alto is only ~$1k).
If you ask for it, the computers even come with whatever username you want setup--you don't even have to fill your name into the account; you just turn the computers on and use them (if you don't ask for it, they infer it from the name on the order).
As I understand it from my friends, System 76 is basically the same way, except that they're Ubuntu only.
I got one early on, when they were only $100 (as did my wife, and a few friends), and it was worth every penny. These days they're selling for $150, and I'd say they're still worth every penny.
why not require that every generic TLD we currently have -.com,.org,.net,.gov,.edu,.mil be preceded by the country TLD to which it belongs? Thereby, one would have things like nasa.us.gov, mit.us.edu, oxford.eng.edu, dod.us.mil and so on. For the ones that already exist, alias them to such a new system, so that those handful of TLDs are generic. After that, there should be less of a proliferation of TLDs. And they all get to be managed by different countries. Only exceptions would be international organizations, like un.gov, nato.mil and so on.
OK, what happens when a person owning a domain moves to a different country?
If you want Open Textbooks, and there are many reasons to want them, you should not start by announcing to the world that you wrote the complete thing in a three day sprint. That's just handing a line to the commercial publishers to use in opposing such works.
Maybe not. But...:
If you are not going to do everything that a commercial publisher and their authors would do to ensure the quality of the work...
A teacher friend recently pointed out this quality of the work in textbooks to me. It seems like quality isn't what makes it hard to compete--rather, it's the same sort of things that made it hard for opensource software to compete with Microsoft et al.
I will change to iphone 5 anyhow because im apple all the way.
For this change yes, i will say again and again: fuck them and the horse they rode in on....
Fuck them.... They wont loose me as a customer....
I guess this is supposed to be irony: you got that exactly backward. Unless you mean "fuck them until they're gratified", which would be a somewhat unusual use of that imperative. You're pretty clearly positioning yourself as the `bottom' in this relationship, though.
So PHB comes around and says roll back to the version that first had x but didn't have y and where to do go? You end up having to go back to the one tagged with that feature and then add in any diffs you see in future checkins that touched that area of code. You end up with a cludge.
This is a case where a DVCS, like git or mercurial, shines. Since each dev has a full copy of the repo, you can work and commit to your heart's content without affecting anyone else's builds. Once you have your major feature completed, then you merge it back into the main repo (after merging in any changes from the main repo to your working copy.)
Better: even in the event that there are actually still issues with the feature when it's merged in, you can continue the branch so that the fixes are all clearly connected to the feature. So it's easy to capture the whole `initial work + tail of fixes' and either revert it or transplant it to another base revision of the codebase.
Maybe I should also mention: the reason I originally got my NanoNote was that I was in a situation where, like OP mrhelio, Wi-Fi was more of a liability than a feature. Not having to worry about RF interference/EMI was a feature. I knew other people who had bought devices with Wi-Fi and then solved the problem by opening-up said devices and diking out the radio components, but I didn't want to have to bother with that.
That Zipit device also appears to have been out of production for a couple of years now.
And, speaking as someone who's used, loved, and even loved hacking on Rockbox, this is one of the big problems I see with it: since it's mostly working `against the grain', it basically doesn't run on anything that's still in production. On the occasion that the Rockbox hackers are able to accelerate the reverse-engineering project enough to port it to something that is still in production, that gets fixed pretty quickly. This was the case with the iPod that I bought specifically to run Rockbox, for example. When that iPod died, I accepted that Rockbox has an ever-enriching past, but no future. It's a pretty fantastic retro-system..., but it's still a retro system.
Have a look at Qi Hardware's NanoNote. It seems like it it fit the bill pretty well, especially if you pair it with TuxBrain's Universal Breakout Board (a small breakout board that plugs into the NanoNote's MicroSD port).
I've bought two NanoNotes for use as portable music players (one for me, one for my wife). We've been running MPD + ncmpc on them (which makes it convenient to either browse or search for songs), along with smart auto-DJ (which means that you can just pick a song to start with, and it'll automatically keep the play-queue filled with appropriate-sounding songs), for the past two years or so.
Running just on the commodity battery that fits inside, we've found that they'll run for at least 8 hours; but they also support the addition of small external battery that'll get you another ~30 hours.
Wait, you're talking about needing to get the job before you can get Linux experience?
If you read my OP, you'd know I already have Linux experience, and a decent amount of it at that.
Then you should be able to get a job with it. It may be lower-level than your ultimate target (i.e. junior sysadmin rather than senior sysadmin), but it'll still let you augment your experience and then migrate upward either via promotion or by changing jobs.
A lot of what I said in the LUG post does apply to sysadmins, also: there are Open Source projects and communities in need of sysadmins. Some of them actually need people to administer servers and development environments, some of them just need someone to do Q&A on administrative issues. Either type can help you build the sort of `portfolio' that makes people want to hire you.
The catch-22 I mentioned refers to the level of Linux experience it seems many jobs require. I can't get 3+ years professional RHEL experience until I get a job administering RHEL, at least presumably
Then get a job administering RHEL that that doesn't require 3+ years of `professional RHEL experience' (whatever that means). Stay there for 3+ years, and then you'll have 3+ years of experience.
I wonder if you're misunderstanding the `3+ years experience' requirements, though: when job-advertisements say something like "3+ years of professional experience", "bachelor degree", etc., what they're really looking for is `equivalent competence' to what they'd normally expect to come out of those backgrounds. Mostly, anyway--there are some employers who stick solid to required numbers, but you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Jobs are usually advertised like that just so that people who aren't even confident in their own competence won't waste the hiring managers' time by applying. But, if you think you do have equivalent competence, apply! They'll interview you before deciding whether to hire you, and that's where they get to decide whether you actually meet their threshold for hire. And that'll be different at different companies, even if the job-advertisements look the same.
One possible strategy is to pick a company that's small enough to have small needs when you get in (or to think they have small needs), where you'll be able to grow as the company grows. My first couple of jobs were with small organisations that needed `some Java programming stuff' and `some Linux stuff'. The `Linux stuff' job turned into systems administration for 30 developers, revision control, release management, driver development, network architecture, and a whole bunch of other things that all went on my resume as professional experience. I think the Open Source stuff I've done has turned out to be more important in actually landing me jobs, though.
How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position?
Wait, you're talking about needing to get the job before you can get Linux experience? The first thing you need to understand is how silly that statement is; we talked about this in my local LUG, a few months back, and one of the other guys summarised pretty aptly:
Even recent graduates have no excuse to not show some kind of experience. Except for the hardware, all the pieces are freely available, and with a bit of creativity/networking/paying attention you can even come up free hardware. (I'd be willing to bet an old computer (or sufficient parts to reconstitute same) that a request sent to this list by a resource-starved student looking for free hardware to use for learning would turn up more than one offer.)
So, when we hire, that's what we look for: experience that actually you can get in your spare time.
The downside of VNC is that you need to create a hole in your firewall for it and you also must know the host name, that puts it a step down from things like logmein.com which I've used to repair windows laptops in cases where I don't control the firewall (in one case Iraq).
I also would be interested in something like that that I could control using my own server and happens to be cross platform.
It's been a few years, since I looked at this, but the last time I needed to solve this problem, Active Port Forwarder was the best option for dealing with the whole `getting in past the firewall without opening up a security hole' issue.
That page isn't very in-depth (to put it mildly.. it doesn't even link to the homework, much less info like "here are the possible requests, here's what you reply to them", some kind of example exchange between servers, etc.),
Yeah--it's an extremely high-level overview, for the most part.
The paragraph at the top of the page (about how the first, and possibly most significant step is almost a no-op in most cases: PuSH-enabling your RSS/Atom feeds so that people can subscribe to you) is pretty valuable even by itself, though. I gathered that you were probably expecting even that to be a lot of effort--just like I had expected it to be.
To make this work, you'll need to implement the http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe WebFinger relationship (described in the OStatus protocol documents).
404.
Er..., oops. Yeah--it looks like things moved to different/better URLs and the links rotted; it'd be nice if someone had at least updated the links to point to the Wikipedia pages, e.g.:
It looks like the URLs that those links really *should* be pointing at are:
http://webfinger.net/
http://ostatus.org/specification
http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
Sorry about that.
(I believe that those can all be found via the Wikipedia articles mentioned above, though)
The best (or at least easiest) way to get started is probably to get the StatusNet (PHP) or rstat.us (Ruby) code and start playing with it on a local server or a scratch domain â
And there are plenty of other sites/platforms that support enough parts of the OStatus stack to be useful (like PuSH, which is the part that allows you to `follow' people on other sites); e.g.: even if your blog-platform doesn't support PuSH, you can run it through FeedBurner and that will make it PuSH-enabled (which is how I get notices from mimiandeunice.com in my StatusNet timeline, for example).
There are probably others that I haven't listed or that I don't know about; when I find new OStatus-related things, I bookmark them on my OStatus-compatible microblog.
2. What good and complete tutorials are there for implementing OSTatus? The ones I tried broke my brain. I want less theory and words, at least initially, and more (pseudo) code. Let's start simple: What do I need to do to make my CMS "folllowable" from the three sites above, for example?
I mean you have at best estimates around 3% being actual desktop users (no you aren't allowed to count servers, routers, your CCC Droid phone, because lets face it those won't run the latest Quake engine games) and of those[â¦]
What `best estimates' are you looking at? Most people `guesstimate' that desktop Linux has `less than 1% market-share', but the only `desktop Linux market-share' estimates I've ever seen based on actual sales-stats were more like 8-10%, and that was an under-estimate because it didn't count computers that had Linux installed post-sale (so, it didn't consider, e.g.: the laptops that ship with Windows or Mac OS and then have Linux installed on them).
Even if desktop Linux had only half of that estimated 10%, it'd still be at least on par with Mac OS X--which had less than 5% market-share worldwide) last year.
the "i store all i can get" model is available in almost every system, but easier for some (mostly federated ones). [â¦] I'm not sure about this problem in other federated systems, for most it will be the same. Centralized Systems like Facebook give me in this respect MORE privacy against my friends
I don't think so. How could that possibly be true?
And, even if it were true, isn't privacy from people who aren't your friends the privacy that's actually important?
i think [diaspora's] data model gives advantage to the node owners, which patch their nodes to store everything they can get
There's no way around that--once you give your information to someone, they have it. Either you trust them with it, or you don't. If you don't trust someone to keep your secrets, don't tell them; i.e.: keep your secrets to yourself--run your own node.
maybe BuddyCloud?
How about StatusNet? It's what runs identi.ca, all of the various status.net sites, all of the sites collected in this guy's list, and a whole bunch of sites probably not in that list. I've got several different StatusNet sites I run, for example.
They're describing exactly the sort of results that http://duckduckgo.com/ gives; try the equivalent search for "john battelle", for example: it lists a whole slew of social-networking pages for him in the `social networking bar'. Right after his Wikipedia page and his official website.
Excuse me, sonny boy, but "younger" isn't the problem. Some of us old folk (aka, fifty in my case) know what the hell is going on here: We're all being frelled by morons and ignorati with this bill and other pieces of stupid legisilation.
"frelled"? I guess you are old--still using Farscape slang? The kids have moved on to Battlestar (`reimagined'), and the preferred euphemism for "fuck" is now "frak"....
Centimetre accuracy can be achieved with Real Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections (either from a local base station or delivered remotely by some kind of long distance connection, e.g. GPRS). Neither option is free, but subscribing to a correction provider is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own base station.
What's `a hell of a lot cheaper'? It's possible to use a smartphone as an RTK base station. That's pretty cheap--and shorter-range Wi-Fi GPS devices are even cheaper (the most expensive part in a smartphone is the `phone' module). Even if the recurring fees to subscribe to someone else's service are technically less than the cost of cheap-o base stations, I wonder if the availability of cheap-o base stations may mean that any cost-difference is too small to matter--e.g., a single-digit number of dollars saved or spent over the course of a year is insignificant enough to `get lost in the noise'.
When Netflix approached the author (and copyright-holder) and asked for a streaming deal, the response they got was `yes, but only if there's no DRM'. Netflix wouldn't budge.
Part of it is that, going by the examples, this statement in the Vash FAQ is just flat-out wrong:
How does Vash work for color blind or other visually impaired individuals?
Despite its visually striking and distinctive impact, color plays only a small role in differentiating between Vash images.
Rather, it shows that the intent is right but the execution has failed: that no two images are differentiated only by being coloured differently is good, but that the shapes composing a given image are defined entirely as borders between colourfields is extremely problematic: because two adjacent colours may or may not even actually be distinguishable for the viewers--as someone who's protanomalous myself, I have difficulty even seeing any of those shapes that are defined purely by boundaries between fields of red/green or blue/purple; and some of the gradients actually make things even worse....
It's like the joke about the `drawing of a polar bear in a blizzard'.
So, you've ended up making colour a much more important aspect than you think:)
A couple of my favourite references on colour vision, and how to work with it:
There's one particular issue that's mentioned in the Firelily article, though only briefly, and it deserves being brought to attention--as a Slashdot commenter did some years back:
blue & red should not be placed next to each other, generally. Since they fall roughly at opposite ends of the
visible spectrum, the eye's focal power differs the most between those colors. As your eye/brain tries to focus properly on two colors that require slightly different adaptations, you can perceive a "vibration" -- the boundary between the red & blue will have a high-frequency shimmering or vibrating appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several makers of Linux laptops, at this point:
I've had great experiences buying from ZaReason, I know people who have had great experiences buying from System76, and ThinkPenguin is another option.
I'm writing this from a ZaReason UltraLap 430 (see recent review on Ars Technica, and a video review by Tom Merritt [note that there are a couple of mistakes about specs in the video]), which I love even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.
My wife has a ZaReason Alto 4330 that she loves even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.
For work, I've had several ZaReason machines--including some Alto 3880 laptops (the previous generation of what my wife now has). We got the Altos with 8-way multiprocessing (4-core + hyperthreading) and gobs of RAM, with run-times of 3-4 hours on a single charge and weight just over 4 lbs; they've made fantastic developers' laptops for us.
And, for what you get, the ZaReason machines aren't even that expensive (seriously--a monster-power Alto is only ~$1k).
If you ask for it, the computers even come with whatever username you want setup--you don't even have to fill your name into the account; you just turn the computers on and use them (if you don't ask for it, they infer it from the name on the order).
As I understand it from my friends, System 76 is basically the same way, except that they're Ubuntu only.
Here: Qi Hardware's NanoNote makes a great programmer's calculator (including graphing/plotting with gnuplot), and it also does some other stuff well, too.
I got one early on, when they were only $100 (as did my wife, and a few friends), and it was worth every penny. These days they're selling for $150, and I'd say they're still worth every penny.
OK, what happens when a person owning a domain moves to a different country?
Maybe not. But...:
A teacher friend recently pointed out this quality of the work in textbooks to me. It seems like quality isn't what makes it hard to compete--rather, it's the same sort of things that made it hard for opensource software to compete with Microsoft et al.
I guess this is supposed to be irony: you got that exactly backward. Unless you mean "fuck them until they're gratified", which would be a somewhat unusual use of that imperative. You're pretty clearly positioning yourself as the `bottom' in this relationship, though.
Or else what? You'll get over it?
I like Michael R. Head's description of VC as "Saving All Your Work Forever":
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~mike/seminars/cvs-svn-bzr-bucs-seminar-2007.pdf .
Better: even in the event that there are actually still issues with the feature when it's merged in, you can continue the branch so that the fixes are all clearly connected to the feature. So it's easy to capture the whole `initial work + tail of fixes' and either revert it or transplant it to another base revision of the codebase.
On passwords, I liked Jeff Atwood's article, `You're Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly'.
For Personally Identifiable Information (PII), I liked Brian Danger Graham's article, `What's in a name database?'.
Hatta, you're actually not far off from Bruce Schneier's "Full Disclosure of Security Vulnerabilities a 'Damned Good Idea'".
Maybe I should also mention: the reason I originally got my NanoNote was that I was in a situation where, like OP mrhelio, Wi-Fi was more of a liability than a feature. Not having to worry about RF interference/EMI was a feature. I knew other people who had bought devices with Wi-Fi and then solved the problem by opening-up said devices and diking out the radio components, but I didn't want to have to bother with that.
That Zipit device also appears to have been out of production for a couple of years now.
And, speaking as someone who's used, loved, and even loved hacking on Rockbox, this is one of the big problems I see with it: since it's mostly working `against the grain', it basically doesn't run on anything that's still in production. On the occasion that the Rockbox hackers are able to accelerate the reverse-engineering project enough to port it to something that is still in production, that gets fixed pretty quickly. This was the case with the iPod that I bought specifically to run Rockbox, for example. When that iPod died, I accepted that Rockbox has an ever-enriching past, but no future. It's a pretty fantastic retro-system..., but it's still a retro system.
Have a look at Qi Hardware's NanoNote. It seems like it it fit the bill pretty well, especially if you pair it with TuxBrain's Universal Breakout Board (a small breakout board that plugs into the NanoNote's MicroSD port).
I've bought two NanoNotes for use as portable music players (one for me, one for my wife). We've been running MPD + ncmpc on them (which makes it convenient to either browse or search for songs), along with smart auto-DJ (which means that you can just pick a song to start with, and it'll automatically keep the play-queue filled with appropriate-sounding songs), for the past two years or so.
Running just on the commodity battery that fits inside, we've found that they'll run for at least 8 hours; but they also support the addition of small external battery that'll get you another ~30 hours.
Then you should be able to get a job with it. It may be lower-level than your ultimate target (i.e. junior sysadmin rather than senior sysadmin), but it'll still let you augment your experience and then migrate upward either via promotion or by changing jobs.
A lot of what I said in the LUG post does apply to sysadmins, also: there are Open Source projects and communities in need of sysadmins. Some of them actually need people to administer servers and development environments, some of them just need someone to do Q&A on administrative issues. Either type can help you build the sort of `portfolio' that makes people want to hire you.
Then get a job administering RHEL that that doesn't require 3+ years of `professional RHEL experience' (whatever that means). Stay there for 3+ years, and then you'll have 3+ years of experience.
I wonder if you're misunderstanding the `3+ years experience' requirements, though: when job-advertisements say something like "3+ years of professional experience", "bachelor degree", etc., what they're really looking for is `equivalent competence' to what they'd normally expect to come out of those backgrounds. Mostly, anyway--there are some employers who stick solid to required numbers, but you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Jobs are usually advertised like that just so that people who aren't even confident in their own competence won't waste the hiring managers' time by applying. But, if you think you do have equivalent competence, apply! They'll interview you before deciding whether to hire you, and that's where they get to decide whether you actually meet their threshold for hire. And that'll be different at different companies, even if the job-advertisements look the same.
One possible strategy is to pick a company that's small enough to have small needs when you get in (or to think they have small needs), where you'll be able to grow as the company grows. My first couple of jobs were with small organisations that needed `some Java programming stuff' and `some Linux stuff'. The `Linux stuff' job turned into systems administration for 30 developers, revision control, release management, driver development, network architecture, and a whole bunch of other things that all went on my resume as professional experience. I think the Open Source stuff I've done has turned out to be more important in actually landing me jobs, though.
Wait, you're talking about needing to get the job before you can get Linux experience? The first thing you need to understand is how silly that statement is; we talked about this in my local LUG, a few months back, and one of the other guys summarised pretty aptly:
So, when we hire, that's what we look for: experience that actually you can get in your spare time.
My own response to the question was longer and provides more specific suggestions.
It's been a few years, since I looked at this, but the last time I needed to solve this problem, Active Port Forwarder was the best option for dealing with the whole `getting in past the firewall without opening up a security hole' issue.
Oh, and of course:
Yeah--it's an extremely high-level overview, for the most part.
The paragraph at the top of the page (about how the first, and possibly most significant step is almost a no-op in most cases: PuSH-enabling your RSS/Atom feeds so that people can subscribe to you) is pretty valuable even by itself, though. I gathered that you were probably expecting even that to be a lot of effort--just like I had expected it to be.
Er..., oops. Yeah--it looks like things moved to different/better URLs and the links rotted; it'd be nice if someone had at least updated the links to point to the Wikipedia pages, e.g.:
It looks like the URLs that those links really *should* be pointing at are:
Sorry about that.
(I believe that those can all be found via the Wikipedia articles mentioned above, though)
The best (or at least easiest) way to get started is probably to get the StatusNet (PHP) or rstat.us (Ruby) code and start playing with it on a local server or a scratch domain â
To start with, every site running StatusNet implements it. Here are a few lists of independent StatusNet sites:
There's also an OStatus plug-in for WordPress, a set of OStatus-bridge apps for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
And there are plenty of other sites/platforms that support enough parts of the OStatus stack to be useful (like PuSH, which is the part that allows you to `follow' people on other sites); e.g.: even if your blog-platform doesn't support PuSH, you can run it through FeedBurner and that will make it PuSH-enabled (which is how I get notices from mimiandeunice.com in my StatusNet timeline, for example).
There are probably others that I haven't listed or that I don't know about; when I find new OStatus-related things, I bookmark them on my OStatus-compatible microblog.
Start with `How to OStatus-enable Your Application'.
What `best estimates' are you looking at? Most people `guesstimate' that desktop Linux has `less than 1% market-share', but the only `desktop Linux market-share' estimates I've ever seen based on actual sales-stats were more like 8-10%, and that was an under-estimate because it didn't count computers that had Linux installed post-sale (so, it didn't consider, e.g.: the laptops that ship with Windows or Mac OS and then have Linux installed on them).
Even if desktop Linux had only half of that estimated 10%, it'd still be at least on par with Mac OS X--which had less than 5% market-share worldwide) last year.
I don't think so. How could that possibly be true?
And, even if it were true, isn't privacy from people who aren't your friends the privacy that's actually important?
There's no way around that--once you give your information to someone, they have it. Either you trust them with it, or you don't. If you don't trust someone to keep your secrets, don't tell them; i.e.: keep your secrets to yourself--run your own node.
How about StatusNet? It's what runs identi.ca, all of the various status.net sites, all of the sites collected in this guy's list, and a whole bunch of sites probably not in that list. I've got several different StatusNet sites I run, for example.
They're describing exactly the sort of results that http://duckduckgo.com/ gives; try the equivalent search for "john battelle", for example: it lists a whole slew of social-networking pages for him in the `social networking bar'. Right after his Wikipedia page and his official website.
"frelled"? I guess you are old--still using Farscape slang? The kids have moved on to Battlestar (`reimagined'), and the preferred euphemism for "fuck" is now "frak"....
What's `a hell of a lot cheaper'? It's possible to use a smartphone as an RTK base station. That's pretty cheap--and shorter-range Wi-Fi GPS devices are even cheaper (the most expensive part in a smartphone is the `phone' module). Even if the recurring fees to subscribe to someone else's service are technically less than the cost of cheap-o base stations, I wonder if the availability of cheap-o base stations may mean that any cost-difference is too small to matter--e.g., a single-digit number of dollars saved or spent over the course of a year is insignificant enough to `get lost in the noise'.
Netflix was the one demanding DRM for `Sita Sings the Blues', which ultimately kept the film out of the `on demand' line-up even though it's in Netflix's DVD-rental library.
When Netflix approached the author (and copyright-holder) and asked for a streaming deal, the response they got was `yes, but only if there's no DRM'. Netflix wouldn't budge.
Rather, it shows that the intent is right but the execution has failed: that no two images are differentiated only by being coloured differently is good, but that the shapes composing a given image are defined entirely as borders between colourfields is extremely problematic: because two adjacent colours may or may not even actually be distinguishable for the viewers--as someone who's protanomalous myself, I have difficulty even seeing any of those shapes that are defined purely by boundaries between fields of red/green or blue/purple; and some of the gradients actually make things even worse.... It's like the joke about the `drawing of a polar bear in a blizzard'. So, you've ended up making colour a much more important aspect than you think :)
A couple of my favourite references on colour vision, and how to work with it:
There's one particular issue that's mentioned in the Firelily article, though only briefly, and it deserves being brought to attention--as a Slashdot commenter did some years back:
It may also be useful to read `Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful'; there are some applicable lessons in there, though they're harder to find.